Heard the Word: Angela Hancock

Hancock preached on Matthew 22: 1-14. Now, if you're just reading this to gloss for ideas, that's great. I want you to keep reading. After you click the link for the text and read it. All of it. I'm serious. Go do it.

Yeah. Verses 13 and 14 are in there.

Hancock read the passage, then ushered up immediately into prayer, "Because after that, I think we need it."

My next post on Hancock's lecture deals with a lot of the underpinnings of this sermon, but for now, I just want to step it through, because it's construction isn't all that complex or original:

She begins with three contemporary stories of individuals who are 'invited.' Invited to church, invited to deeper faith, invited into faith-based relationships. And all three of them somehow turn down the invitation. But Hancock reminds us that there always comes another invitation. So...how do we handle this text?

She then hopped into the text, really imagining the scene with us, and acknowledges quickly that it isn't a normal story about the world as we know it. Something else is going on here, something bigger than that that we can't quite wrap our arms around.

And so, she jumps into the theological implications of the text, sorting through popular ways of interpreting it. It was like she was sorting through old photographs, looking for the one that matched the picture in her mind, and yet, there wasn't one there. She kept setting aside interpretations and digging further into the pile, eventually uncovering with us that this story is not something we can fit into a Polaroid frame. No. It's something much worse than that, she told us.

But she told us we could avoid the terrible. We could avoid the hard. We could just look at the text and avoid verses 11-14. Or 13 and 14. We could just make it a question of whether or not you will accept the invitation to the theological wedding banquet. And drop the mic there.

But Hancock pushes us to consider verse 14--verse 14 which causes us such holy confusion, which causes us to wonder what in the world is happening here, which causes us to want to fix the story. Again, we encounter the idea that this is not a normal story about a normal wedding banquet that Jesus is telling here. And so again, she moves through the traditional interpretations of this text: that the man is not righteous enough to be at the party, that the man is not faithful enough to be at the party, because he didn't care enough to take the robes offered him at the entrance to the party (literalist interpretation), because Jesus never would have said this and so he didn't.

For a moment, she steps back and looks at this interpretation, and uncovers our bias. We want so badly for the man to be kicked out because he deserves it. We want so badly for Jesus not to come off sounding like a jerk here. But then, there's verse 14 to deal with, and we find that it's true, this is not just a story about humanity's failing or a man who doesn't dress appropriately for a party. Instead, it's a story about God's way with us. And if this is how God deals with us, then what are we to make of this?

At this point, my notes dropped off. Because the interpretive turn that Hancock took was new to me. She insisted that Jesus is really the one kicked out of the banquet, that Jesus is the one who was found to be unworthy by the host and was bound, and tossed, and sent where nobody wants to go. It was Jesus who was chosen. Hancock concluded with an image of Jesus having offered his wedding robe to us, so that we could partake of the banquet. And then, she walked off stage.

So, my first instinct was to pick up my Bible and frantically locate the text and read the other stories surrounding it. Here, Jesus is talking to the chief priests and elders at the temple in Jerusalem. The two parables that Jesus tells before this refer to them (they finally realize). I could see how Hancock came to this interpretation. But I was also surprised that with as much openness as she had in the exegetical process in the content of her sermon that she didn't make this process more clear. Instead, she dropped it on us, then walked away.

This is a general critique of the Festival--it felt like most of the preachers didn't know how to end a sermon. So often, I felt like a burden had been dropped on my lap, needed still to be unpacked and given some kind of instruction in order to take it out into the world. So often with these sermons, I felt I would rather leave that package sitting on the pew when I left. Now, I'm going to err on the side of generosity and assume that these folks know they are preaching to professional preachers, and so they can toss a few harder passes at us than someone who is just picking up the sport of faith, but I couldn't help but shake this feeling that some of what they were teaching in doing this just WILL NOT translate in our congregations today.

But past this, I think this was an important sermon for me to hear because I am often so caught up in sermon delivery and structure. This sermon was not delivered or structured in any way that was surprising or even all that exciting. It was entirely the focus on the story, knowing that we would eventually get to the difficult part that I didn't understand, it was the promise that we wouldn't ignore that strangeness of it that kept me engaged. For me, it tied in nicely with Brian McLaren's session the previous morning about reshaping how we look at texts and how we might do better to engage them fully. For me, Hancock's message showed me how to deal with a difficult pericope that doesn't initially sound like it winds up in a place of grace. But through faithful interpretation and understanding, it might just do that.

Heard the Word: Yvette Flunder

All. Right. I think all of us from Eden were ready for Flunders' message. We were ready for some church. We were ready for some celebration. And she did not disappoint. Her message title, "God is a Mighty Good Healer" was based on a phrase her grandmother would use while working in the kitchen. Flunder remembered how out of nowhere, her family would hear her grandmother exclaim, "Hey! Hallelujah!" from the kitchen while she cooked. A remembrance of God's incredible work in the world would strike her, and she wouldn't wait to celebrate. She would do it right then and there.

Flunder preached on John 9: 1-11, what she calls the "second spitting incident" in Jesus healing ministry to the blind (see Mark 8: 23-26 for the other). Early on, I could see how Moss' lecture about preaching the blues was at play in Flunder's message, so I honed in on that as she preached.

Right up front, Flunder laid on us the biblical blues, exploring the very real problem of blindness in biblical times--20 out of every 100 people was blind in some way, whether it was near- or far-sightedness, cataracts, or another sight impairment, there were no options for correction then. She used this information as a springboard into discussing the problem of blindness in places in the world today where good medical care, nutrition, access to clean water, and eye care are not accessible. She sang the eschatological blues, helping us to see the issue in the here and now.

And for most of the sermon, she riffed between the two of these, building the tension between the biblical blues and our present circumstances. She nuanced it all as she moved through the text, teasing out its meaning, walking it through in these terms. Her celebration was introduced here--that Jesus' healing isn't about just getting better...it's about "removing stigma so that we could return to productivity." And Flunder does celebrate this for a while, sitting with the idea that if we are changed, we can change the world. If we are free, we can free anyone who we come into contact with.

And as she builds this tension, she worked up to the theological blues--that many of us are unwilling to be healed. That many of us resist God's healing power because of what will be expected of us next. When the man's eyes were healed, he had a charge--to go to the "pool of sent" and to return to productivity. How many of us resist God's healing because we don't actually want to be productive?

But she continued to celebrate--to celebrate the times when we do heal. To celebrate the imagined space in which we all walked out into the world whole, bearing stigma for our difficulties no more, and preaching the gospel by sharing our experience.

But probably the coolest moment of the sermon for me was when she was able to connect her vision of wholeness with that preaching moment. She told us that she was, "Preaching in tongues." She said that her mere presence at this festival, and the fact that she was preaching out of her culture and that we (a significant majority WASPs) could understand her was the work of the Holy Spirit at work in the world and in the church that she wanted to celebrate. I want to come back to this and write more about cultures represented here, but that moment really was of note for me.

Flunder's sermon was excellent. But I'm also excited that I was able to apply Moss' lecture to it. I really believe that having a capacity to speak about and for tragedy is an important part of preaching, and Flunder gave me an excellent model for how to do that faithfully.

Preaching Lessons: Otis Moss III

Otis Moss III brought it. His lecture, "Preaching Prophetic Blues in a Post-Modern World," was inspirational, challenging, and a prophetic call for preachers. For Moss, the blues represent a worldview--a way of understanding the visible world from the underside. He understands blues to be a statement of existential existence that is incomplete without eschatalogical hope, and vice versa. In short, "The gospel is not the gospel without the blues."

Moss argues that a preacher cannot preach the Good News without confronting tragedy in three forms: existential blues (What is the tragedy before us?), theological blues (Calvary is nothing BUT the blues.), and biblical blues (Scripture is literature of an oppressed people. Period.). Only by preaching the blues are we able to face tragedy head on without falling into despair. Only by being open to what makes us weep do we understand what makes God weep, and then can we find the eschatological hope that God's grace makes apparent. 

It struck me that what Moss was saying was what Barbara Brown Taylor was saying which was what Anna Carter Florence was saying: do not ignore the shadows. Do not ignore the darkness. Do not ignore the sadness and tragedy. To do so is to fail to preach the fullness of the gospel message. Blues without gospel is despair. And gospel without blues is just happy clappy.

It seems that if this is a major undercurrent of the preaching and lectures at the Festival, that it is an undercurrent in Christian life in American today. We have an incredible ability to hide our blues, to ignore them, to pretend them away for the sake of appearances. Moss says we preachers avoid the blues because we hide in the daily tasks of 'pastoral concerns,' because lament may not be in our tradition, because we fear conflict and rejection. These are more reflections of our culture than they are of our faith.

To preach with integrity is to give space for the blues and to allow them to be understood in light of the gospel, and vice versa. And incredibly, freedom is the result. Freedom to talk about our pain, our fear, our uncertainty, our darkness. And freedom to work communally toward solutions. Moss certainly struck home with many of us when he said, "If you never preach the blues, you may be a part of the structure that creates the blues for others." Ouch.

Though his message is intensely relevant for today, I imagine it's always been intensely relevant for preachers. Praise and lament are deeply related--just look to the Psalms for a quick education there--but is it inherent in our humanity to cover our brokenness and try to sing only praise? And if so, living into the image God created us in means to expose that brokenness to allow for creative healing.